Idea Library

From time to time we find particular articles, authors and websites of value. These thoughts and links are captured here to help you achieve greater business success. Enjoy.

Eight Steps To Building Better Business

1. Look in the organizational mirror.

Take time to look back on where you’ve come from. What can you learn? What do you do well, or not so well? What mistakes do you continue to make? Are there ideas you’ve shelved that might work better today?

2. CAT scan your people and processes.

What is your candid assessment or your people and processes? If you used a CAT scan where would you see the jewels and where are the malignancies? Be honest and face reality as it is, not as it was or wish it were.

3. Get a second opinion.

A third part review of your business yields insight. Everyone needs an outside –in perspective. Get a “customer check” via a third party to validate your internal view. You learn more from unhappy customers than satisfied. Take Microsoft’s view. They focus 90% of their effort in understanding why people are unsatisfied with their products.

4. Ask Jack Welch’s Five Questions.

• What does your competitive environment look like?
• In the last three years, what have your competitors done?
• In the last three years, what have you done to them?
• How might they attack you in the future?
• What are your plans to leapfrog them?

5. Build and use your One Page Plan every day.

Watch any football coach on the sideline. They have their one-page game plan in front of themselves constantly. What are the key elements of your one-page plan? Are you keeping it “in play” at all times? Are your people?

6. Remember SAM.

Kotter at the Havard Business school emphasizes three key leadership elements.